40 Acts - Day 21: ' Global Warming '

Creation is in trouble. Scientists predict new global crises every other day, and our governments are under increasing pressure to do something about it. But really, much of the problem lies with us. Small things, every day, make a difference. It's the difference between leaving a legacy of destruction and ensuring life for those who come after us.

‘You shall not covet.’ 

(Exodus 20:17)

A few months ago, Amnesty International and Greenpeace issued a joint statement to the 195 countries meeting together in Paris for COP21 to discuss climate change. The statement linked global temperature rises with human rights: an additional 600 million people could face hunger by 2080 due to climate change, it reads. A few days later, the world’s governments signed an agreement to reduce net carbon emissions to 0% by 2050, signalling an end to the fossil fuel age.

Climate justice will be difficult to deliver though, because dirty fuel helps provide cheap products; and there’s another, less overt, type of fuel driving demand for them. A fuel stemming from you and me. The Bible calls it mammon. Love of stuff. God thought it so important that he enshrined it in the Ten Commandments.

We’re surrounded by an ocean of things we don’t need. Things that seemed fun – useful even – when we bought them: electric juicers, ice cream makers, spaghetti forks with rotating heads. If we were to play Where Are They Now? a year on, I’d guess they wouldn’t have a starring role.

G.K. Chesterton said, ‘There are two ways to get enough: one is to continue to accumulate more and more; the other is to desire less.’

What’s the real cost of the things you desire? Almost everything we buy has a carbon footprint. Isn’t it time we faced up to the fact that our decision to hush up the tenth commandment has far wider reaching consequences than emptying our purses: it’s costing the Earth.

A few months ago, the governments of 195 countries, that’s all the countries in the world – financially challenged, developing countries amongst them – committed to strive to end climate injustice. This Lent, will you join them?



Today's blog was written by Emma Greenwood from Liberti Magazine. 
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